Pie, meet Sky

Aside from money from state and county agencies and a few employees of very few industrial companies around and about the Grays Harbor area, Montesano doesn’t have much to call income. There’s lots of “For Sale” signs around and about.

Economics 101 says you need money to get better economically. We can’t even afford to smooth out the main drag through town. Which is to say, we don’t have a surfeit of extra cash laying around as a city.

We need to attract businesses that bring money from other places into our little hamlet – not just places like the passing motorists’ wallets on their way to the beach. We need to attract money from people in Seattle, Illinois, Nebraska, Michigan, Belgium, China, South Korea. Right now we buy things from those places (read: send them our money) and sell them to each other for enough profit to pay our mortgages. We cannot grow our little town until that changes.

That’s what’s broken. That’s what needs to be fixed. Besides basic maintenance and upgrading of essential infrastructure and services, that’s where our mayor and council should be focused.

Roundabouts and rest areas and burdensome building upgrade rules are solutions without problems. At least in the last two years, the problems weren’t publicized if they exist. The simple fact of the matter is that those things will, at best, go unnoticed. At worst they will discourage businesses from coming to town and maybe cause some businesses to leave town.

Making Montesano better is a simple process:

Identify a problem.

Identify possible solutions.

Generate a cost/benefit analysis (CBA) for each proposed solution.

Find the solution with the best CBA.

Do it.

Make sure it’s done right.

I’ll do step one for you:

Montesano needs legal, non-government-subsidy income from outside of town.